Letwin Racism Tarnishes Thatcher Legacy

The release of Government papers under the 30-year rule is another of those seasonal highlights that has the power to embarrass those involved who are still on the political scene. In the mid-80s, Margaret Thatcher was in her pomp, but not all was plain sailing, with rioting in London and Birmingham taxing the minds of her ministers and advisers. One of the latter was a certain Oliver Letwin.

The London rioting had centred on the Broadwater Farm estate in Tottenham, many of whose residents were unemployed, disaffected - and black. The older and wiser of Tory ministers, such as David Young, Douglas Hurd and Kenneth Baker, advocated positive action, but Letwin and his colleague Hartley Booth (later a casualty in the litany of “Tory Sleaze”) were having none of it.

They informed Mrs T that “lower-class unemployed white people had lived for years in appalling slums without a breakdown of public order on anything like the present scale” - somehow missing the appalling attitude of the Metropolitan Police towards black youth, which in turn was magnified by press bigotry - before warning “that setting up a £10m communities programme to tackle inner-city problems would do little more than ‘subsidise Rastafarian arts and crafts workshops’”. Letwin went to Eton, y’know.

It got worse - a lot worse. Booth and Letwin dismissed suggestions for positive action with “Riots, criminality and social disintegration are caused solely by individual characters and attitudes. So long as bad moral attitudes remain, all efforts to improve the inner cities will founder. David Young’s new entrepreneurs will set up in the disco and drug trade”.

Quite apart from underscoring the patronising Tory attitude towards kinds of music they could not comprehend, and the lazy “black equals Rastafarian” stereotype, the worst thing about this saga is that Letwin and Booth prevailed, that Letwin was allowed to have three goes at becoming an MP, and that he is still sufficiently well regarded within the party to have been made David Cameron’s chief policy adviser.

Worse again is that there are some, despite Letwin’s apology - one of those “not really an apology” ones, and only because he got caught - who are still prepared to go in to bat for him. The serially clueless Tim Montgomerie was typical, with “Oliver Letwin's remarks from 30 years ago look badly worded but he's a decent man and in my experience he hasn't a racist bone in his body”. Yeah, right.

As Owen Jones has pointed out, “When Oliver Letwin offered Thatcher his racist advice, he was about my age now, and it was the 1980s, not the 1950s”. Not only are Letwin’s comments deeply ignorant and offensive, his view prevailed within the Thatcher Government of the mid-80s. But listening to Letwin ultimately did not go well for Mrs T: he was an early advocate of trialling the Poll Tax in Scotland.

That’s the Poll Tax that helped lead to Margaret Thatcher’s downfall. Right now, David Cameron, you should be afraid. Very afraid.